The Senate

Senate keeps TEA as D'Hondt amendment falls well short

Article 1 of the Get alts out of the Senate Amendment drew 29.82% Aye, nowhere near the two-thirds required. Threshold Equal Approval survives, and so do countbacks.

Updated 30 Jul 2026 2 min read

The most consequential constitutional question of the cycle has been answered, and the answer is no. Article 1 of the Get alts out of the Senate Amendment was rejected in referendum with 29.82% voting Aye, far below the two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution.

SimDemocracy will therefore continue to elect its Senate under Threshold Equal Approval (TEA).

What was on the table

The amendment would have replaced TEA with a closed party-list system using the D’Hondt method. In practice that meant three changes at once:

  • Voters would have picked one party, not scored individual candidates.
  • Parties would have submitted ordered lists of candidates in a predetermined order of preference, and seats would have been allocated to parties according to how many votes they received and how many seats they had already won.
  • Countbacks would have been abolished. By-elections would not have returned either; instead, party leaders would simply have chosen who filled a vacancy.

That last point drew attention during the campaign, since it moves the filling of empty Senate seats out of the electorate’s hands and into the party leaderships’.

The margin

At 29.82% Aye, this was not a close-run thing. The amendment carried emergency status and was put to a 24-hour poll, and it finished more than thirty-six points short of the bar it needed to clear.

It was the second constitutional amendment rejected in the same cycle, after the Speakership Election Amendment fell earlier in the week on 47.37%.

The result was released provisionally alongside the Registration Officer confirmation, pending questions the Electoral Commissioner had put to the Registration Officer about potentially invalid SUITs. The Commissioner judged it “exceedingly unlikely” that anything outstanding would change either outcome — a judgement the margin here makes easy to accept.

With the electoral system unchanged, the Call for Candidates for the 173rd Senatorial Election followed within the hour. Had the amendment passed, the Commissioner noted, the template would have had to be rewritten first.